How to deal with 'toxic' parents

When Toronto lawyer Brian Ludmer speaks about the suffering caused by
parental alienation, the words come from his head and his heart.

He's seen the devastation of a mother's orchestrated campaign to make her
children hate their father, or how a dad can use a 4-year-old as a weapon
against his mother in the ugly aftermath of divorce.

Ludmer is, by training, a corporate lawyer. But he's being "swamped" by
desperate parents looking for help reconnecting with their children. "Experts in
this field will tell you that they've never met a lawyer who understands this
the way that I do," says Ludmer.

That's because he's also lived it.

"Parental alienation is a plague. It's rampant out there," says Ludmer, 48,
who declined to talk about his own case for fear of upsetting his children.
"This stuff has been going on for a hundred years. It's just that now it has a
name."

Later this month, Ludmer will address the first international conference on
parental alienation in Toronto. He'll join the growing chorus of parents,
judges, lawyers, social workers and mental health professionals who believe the
courts are ill-equipped to deal with "toxic" parents.

"Canada seems to be a hotbed of parental alienation court activity," says Amy
Baker, a New York-based researcher who's written two books, one chronicling the
emotional suffering that travels in parental alienation's wake.

"I think there are some very brave judges who are willing to really think
through the implications of alienation and really try to deal with it.

"The bottom line is that to turn a child against a parent is to turn a child
against himself."

Two months ago, a Toronto judge stripped a mother of
custody of her three daughters after a decade-long campaign to keep the kids
from their father. She was ordered to pick up the tab for a U.S. program
aimed at helping the girls, ages 9 to 14, reconnect with their dad.

This week, an 18-year-old from Mississauga asked to be awarded custody of
his two younger brothers caught up in a decade of family "warfare." He also
asked that parental alienation experts, such as psychologists Randy Rand and
Richard Warshak, be forbidden from further contact with the boys. He called
programs, such as their controversial Family Workshop for Alienated
Children, "voodoo science."

But there's so much concern about the snail's pace of the overloaded
family court system and the lack of treatment facilities in Canada that
Ludmer has been working with a group of professionals on plans for Toronto's
first Family Reunification Clinic. They hope to have the facility open
within a year, offering treatment based on the work of Rand and Warshak.

"The most important part (of undoing alienation) is the after care," says
Ludmer, who's handled more than 50 parental alienation cases in the last
four years. "We don't want to be bundling kids on a plane and sending them
off to the United States. This will make it easier and less disruptive to
get the whole family the help they need."

The planned centre is sure to set off a storm of controversy among those
who consider Warshak and Rand's work cult-like "deprogramming" and question
whether Parental Alienation Syndrome isn't just an excuse for bad, or even
abusive, parents.

"I think the therapy often does way more harm than any so-called parental
alienation could do. It demoralizes kids, it makes them feel like they're
not being listened to and involved. It demeans them," says Joyanna Silberg
of the U.S.-based Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal
Violence, a group of health professionals.

"One of the reasons this is so controversial is because it's become an
industry – a money-making industry – where purveyors of these so-called
therapies and evaluation procedures are using things that the scientific
community doesn't automatically accept, but know that judges are accepting
in court to affect children's lives in an extreme way."

Veteran family court judge Harvey Brownstone sums up the growing debate
best: "The jury is still out on the whole issue of parental alienation. When
a child adamantly refuses to see a parent, it is not easy to know why. It
could be they're bored, or that they don't like the parent's new partner.
The situation is usually layered and complex."

If there is a growing certainty about one thing, it's that these cases
need to be dealt with quickly.

"Time is the enemy of the alienated parent," says Baker, whose book
Breaking the Ties that Bind, chronicles the difficult lives of 40
adults who were alienated as children. Since the books, she's met hundreds
of others, including one who went as far as plastic surgery to wipe out the
shame of looking like his father. "These cases should be fast-tracked
because alienating parents exploit the ability for the courts to delay
things to their benefit. The more time they have with the kid, the more time
that kid is going to resist reconciliation."

Veteran family law lawyer Jeffery Wilson – who was involved in Ontario's
first court case around alienation in 1981 and is representing the
Mississauga teen fighting for his brothers – believes it's time for more
drastic measures. It's been estimated that some 60 per cent of litigants in
"high-conflict" divorces suffer from personality disorders that can turn a
discussion of "Who gets the kids for Christmas?" into a months-long power
struggle marked by what Ludmer calls "bad messaging and bad-mouthing."

Wilson is calling for a government-funded "High-Conflict Response Team"
that could step in before these cases hit the courts. They would have the
power to sort out complex disputes, impose binding judgments and get the
kids – and their parents – counselling and treatment.

Family Solutions is a North York-based team of well-respected
psychologists and social workers who started meeting five years ago to
compare notes on difficult cases. Now they offer everything from mediation
to intensive counselling in high-conflict divorces. They've seen a
significant growth in parental alienation and have had some success with
clients who've worked with Rand and Warshak.

"There's a lot of work we still need to do," acknowledges Linda Chodos, a
social worker with Family Solutions. "We don't yet have a lot of
evidence-based research that shows what kind of intervention works best."

Rand and Warshak are based in California and Texas respectively and, in
the first phase of their workshop, meet the children and the alienated
parent for "educational" sessions that can include simple outings where they
start to get reacquainted. (Rand apparently travelled to meet the siblings
of the 18-year-old in a Montreal hotel room, but their mother, who claims to
have been alienated by the father, gave up a day later when they refused to
participate in the four-day session.)

"It's to give the child a break – a chance to catch his or her breath and
to give them just a few days not to be torn between the two parents," says
Ted Horowitz, a veteran social worker with Family Solutions.

The alienator is brought in as part of the second part of the program,
all of which is aimed at making them aware of the damage they are doing and
the need to form a new partnership around parenting.

"There is no deprogramming and never has been," says Jacqueline
Vanbetlehem, a mental health therapist with Family Solutions. "You have to
really look at the circumstances of the family before you even recommend
such a program. Sometimes the court intervention is a relief to these
children because they don't have to choose (between parents) anymore."

Warshak told the Ontario Bar Association's annual meeting last month that
17 out of 21 children who have completed the "expensive" program have forged
good relationships with the other parent that continue more than two years
later. The results are currently undergoing peer review.

"One of the misperceptions around this is that it's meant to shift
allegiances from one parent to the other," says Horowitz. "The idea is to
balance the family – to pull them together. Both parents need to be part of
the treatment, and the children need to see their parents working together."

Canada fails children by failing to have a legal presumption of equal
parenting after separation. Its feminist legislation that gives generally gives
in most cases, mothers, sole custody and a breeding ground for psychological
child abuse. Judges, especially Ontario Superior court judges are on a War
Against Men. Many judges have a pathological hatred against men. These judicial
child abusers encourage generally mothers to engage in various forms of
psychological abuse. PAS is just one name, and the article here, simply fails to
describe even the tip of the iceberg. Even this article is written with an male
bashing slant. In sum, cure the causes, legislate equal parenting,
psychologically screen judges and scrap the judicial council for real judicial
police. see the research at Oottawa Mens Centre

12:29 PM

Judges portray an impartial objective god like approach. That is rarely the
case. Most of the time, you can feel the hatred towards men oozing out of the
court room walls. The average person has no idea of just how bad the legal
nightmare is. Our judiciary are out of control on war against men which destroys
children's relationships with their father. The proof, note that men are legally
just as entitled to spousal support as women but, the fact is, the judicial bias
against me is so strong that its almost an insult to the judiciary if a male
asks a court for spousal support, regardless of the evidence. In fact, the
courts make sure the case never gets to trial in the first place. See the
research by Peter Roscoe on Judicial Bias at the Ottawa Mens Centre